Product Details

• Actors: Jalal Moghadam, Khosro Shakibai, Anik Shefrazian, Bita Farahi, Hossein Sarshar
• Directors: Dariush Mehrjui
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: Persian
• Subtitles: English
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: Unrated
• Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
• DVD Release Date: August 24, 2004
• Run Time: 117 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0002F6BF6
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #97,877 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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  #27 in	Movies & TV > Art House & International > By Original Language > Persian (Farsi)
  #30 in	Movies & TV > Art House & International > By Country > Iran

Editorial Reviews

Review
An extraordinary blend of comedy and despair, philosophical musing, bold cultural analysis and acerbic social satire. --New York Press

Product Description
Hamoun is a psychological comedy/drama about a bumbling Iranian intellectual, Hamid Hamoun. The film follows 24 hours in the life of Hamoun as he is trying and failing to write his dissertation about love and faith while also trying to cope with his wife Mashid, a successful artist, who wants a divorce. Hamoun's refusal to accept his collapsing reality, is both a character study and metaphor for a condition of modern urban life in Iran. In 1997, Hamoun was voted the best Iranian film ever made by a survey of Iranian film critics. Mehrjui's The Cow had previously held that honor.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Psycho-fantasy!, June 3, 2006

By	Ashwin (Bangalore, India) - See all my reviews

This is a pretty interesting off beat flick! It chronicles the life of the protagonist, a writer by the name of Hamoun. The directorial touch of flitting between the past and the present is an interesting treatment and keeps the movie that much more enjoyable, since the contrasts are stark on the one hand & the plot crystallized on the other. As we weave through Hamoun's life, his work, his wife, her work, their relationship, the others in their lives... we slowly become completely enmeshed with the character & thats when the movie really starts to trip into phantasmagoria.

Incidentally, the movie throws a very different light on the condition of women in Iran. Some of the dialogues and situations are indeed quite forward & reflective of an open society and one where women are not necessarily completely subjugated to men. Which makes one wonder if one is over-interpreting the middle east from television images, and maybe there exists the educated elite too, where women are an integral part of society.

In any case, this is a delightful watch with friends with strong characters & an interesting storyline.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the Italian Movie, November 28, 2007

By	Glen Koehn (London, Ontario) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Hamoun was a disappointment for me, partly because it had been overpraised with comparisons to Fellini's 8½. Both movies indeed make use of dream or fantasy sequences and both deal with a middle aged man's intellectual and marital confusions. But for the sake of future viewers, let's be clear: Hamoun is not in the same league as 8½. Mehrjui can't match Fellini's wit and brilliant visual style, and his film lacks the same coherence. Allusions to famous directors, and references to Kierkegaard, Daoism and Robert Pirsig's motorcycle book don't supply profundity to the exercise.

I'm not saying it's an awful movie. It probably works better in Farsi, but the English subtitles of my DVD are unidiomatic and ungrammatical (I mean, at any rate, the words that are visible).

2.0 out of 5 stars Wack and weird, April 7, 2009

By	Rose Blossom - See all my reviews

This movie was crazy. Just when your starting to make sense of the movie something strange and unusual happens.And whatever you do dont eat while watching this.The writer of this film was obviously trying to make this movie different and exotic.Yet it just turned out basically all weird.If you like movies that are strange and collide with the usual this movie is for you.Finally,The subtitles are sometimes hard to see and are ungrammatical,yet you can mostly tell what the charcters are saying.